Tokyo (AFP)
Liverpool and Manchester United, England, are beginning their preparations for a busy season, among a major list of European football clubs returning to the marketing-rich Asian continent, for the first time since the beginning of the “Covid-19” pandemic.
The two English Premier League giants meet on Tuesday in Bangkok in the first match of the new Dutch coach, Erik ten Hag, who will face the experienced German Juergen Klopp.
Liverpool was close to achieving a historic quartet of English clubs last season, before Manchester City thwarted its hopes in the “Premier League” and lost the Champions League final to Real Madrid.
For his part, Paris Saint-Germain, which includes Argentine stars Lionel Messi, Brazilian Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, is moving to Japan, after abandoning Argentine coach Mauricio Pochettino and replacing him with former Nice coach Christophe Galtier.
And Tottenham will be very welcome in South Korea next week, as it includes the best Asian player, striker Son Heung-min, who shared with Egyptian Mohamed Salah, the Liverpool striker, the top scorer in the English Premier League last season.
Aston Villa, Crystal Palace and Leeds United fly to Singapore and Australia, in an attempt to “reunite” with their Asian fans, after the forced “quarantine” as a result of the repercussions of the outbreak of the Corona virus in the past two years.
“We know that the situation was difficult for our fans all over the world because they did not see the team,” said Sebastian Fasel, managing director of PSG in the Asia-Pacific region, whose team is playing three matches against clubs from the Japanese League.
And there is an unprecedented opportunity for Liverpool and Manchester United fans to see the two historical rivals meet in the Thai capital, Bangkok, at the 51,000-capacity Rajamangala Stadium.
But many will be disappointed after they wake up to the news of the absence of Portuguese attacking star Cristiano Ronaldo from the United squad for “family reasons”, amid speculation that he will leave the Red Club.
“It will be the biggest match Asia has ever hosted,” said Asian sports marketing expert Marcus Lauer, who engineered the two teams’ arrival in Thailand.
“There is no K-Pop team, or any other football club, that could be more important than these two teams coming here.”
Fans have to spend huge amounts of money to watch the stars of both teams such as the Egyptian Salah, the Dutchman Virgil van Dijk from Liverpool, or the Portuguese Bruno Fernandes and Harry Maguire from Manchester United, as the cheapest tickets are about $ 140.
United fan Bhawit Banjarattanakorn, 27, said he was looking forward to taking pictures with the players at their hotel, but would not buy a ticket because it was “too expensive”.
“It’s just a friendly match, and it doesn’t guarantee that you will see players like Cristiano Ronaldo playing the whole match,” he said.
After the match, United will move to Australia, where they will meet Melbourne Victory, Crystal Palace and Aston Villa.
As for Liverpool, it faces Crystal Palace in Singapore, and Leeds United and Aston Villa participate in the Queensland Champions Cup in Australia, along with the local team Brisbane Roar.
Tottenham, which includes in its ranks the captains of the South Korean men’s and women’s national teams, will meet a group of players from the South Korean League, in addition to Sevilla, Spain, in Suwon.
Lauer believes that confrontations between European clubs, rather than playing with local clubs only, means that they will be “competitive matches”: Liverpool and Manchester United meet in the third stage of the domestic league, so it is not far away, and he continued, “If you are the coach or the players, it is a suitable opportunity. To know your condition.
Clubs are chasing commercial gains from their Asian tours in an area which Lauer says “remains critical to any football club in the world”.
It is true that Saint-Germain returns to Japan for the first time since 1995, but it has an office in Tokyo, and has remained active there in retail, esports and fashion.
Vassil describes Japan as a “strategic country”, where Saint-Germain has six million fans, and says that the summer tour is “the last piece of the Basel”.
He continued, “Since the launch of our project, Japan has been very central to what we wanted to achieve in terms of developing the brand, and the first line players will come, not the reserve players, because I’m starting to hear that some fans in Japan are afraid that the star players won’t come.”
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